After a rather long run the other day that resulted in my phone actually temporarily switching off because of the amount of sweat that got into it, I had a bit of a pain in my right leg that to me suggested that maybe I shouldn't go on yet another run and aggravate the situation.
Therefore I decided to go for a bike ride with no particular goal in mind.
It turns out that cycling area was going to make that decision for me because there were so many people out there that I couldn't really get up to a speed that I would consider to be good exercise.
After an hour I wasn't tired, I hadn't really felt as though I was working very hard, and I had plenty of water remaining but I went home because of one big problem, my butt was sore from the seat.
These are km/hr by the way, not a per km time like is displayed in running.
For me, I was restricted by the masses and how we had a bunch of people that don’t seem to understand that the left lane is for passing, not hanging around and talking to your buddy, so I was never really able to push myself. Another thing that kind of makes cycling feel as though it is too easy is the technology. I have 21 gears and while my bike isn’t top-end, that does make almost any situation something where I don’t have to work very hard because where I live is almost entirely completely flat
I have been listening to a couple of podcasts where there are certain trainers that have stated that zone 2 cardio can be very beneficial for your endurance and all I can say is that I hope they are correct, because even though I was trying to get into zone 3 it just didn’t seem like it was going to happen and is unlikely to ever happen where I live since there are 8 million people here and virtually no open spaces.
In the end my phone's evaluation of this one hour of exercise was a disappointing one and if there is one thing I really don't like to do it is to disappoint my apps!
While these apps are not meant to be the truth, I have to say that I agree with the assertion that this activity should be considered a "maintenance" level of effort and no real gains can be expected from it. However, if someone was in less of a cardiovascular "good shape" than I am, perhaps their readout would be different. While the computations these things do is meant to be quite complicated, all it is really doing is comparing your heart rate with your weight, age, and height. So someone who is particularly overweight (i'm only a few kg over) this would probably be considered a much more intense level of exercise.
I suppose this is one of the downsides of getting into better shape, it becomes increasingly difficult to find things that are really going to push your boundaries. This was one thing I liked about when I was just lifting... there is always a couple more plates you can throw on a lift.
I will likely only go cycling on days where I have a pain in my legs from running because I don't really consider it to be real exercise.